Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
6. Towns along the Hungarian and Slovak border
Towns along the Hungarian and Slovak border 6. 4. 2 Plans for the joint organization of services The most complete form of cooperation is when services are joined to satisfy human and market needs regardless of borders. This is the most practical form of cooperation. It mostly involves institutions, such as communal supply, schools, health care and social provision as services meeting human needs and as economic actors that monitor market needs to make profits. The local government of any settlement may choose a form of meeting the needs of the population when they make use of the facilities on both sides of the border. In this respect, county-level local governments play the role of mediators. They try to find the actors that carry out similar tasks and the parties entitled to negotiate and then they encourage them (state, municipality, business or civil partners) to enter into negotiations with each other. To unite their services, they offer the necessary administrative, official and legal knowledge. Following this, the institutions taking part in service provision indirectly (hospitals, health service, ambulance, primary and secondary education, social institutions and communal suppliers, etc.) inform each other about their strengths and weaknesses, about where they have free capacity or lack of capacity. In accordance with intergovernmental agreements, mutual urgent health provision is approved and settled. In case of programmed and planned health provision, depending on the condition of the patients, an agreement between the social security systems is necessary regarding the costs. Health care is rather costly and needs a lot of instruments and equipment. Therefore it has to be examined how the burdens could be shared in the frame of cooperation. It has to be examined which party is in a better situation in which field, who has something to offer to the other party in return for something else. The first step is surveying the specialist fields, then the system of covering the costs. The costs of health provision are different in the different countries; there can be considerable differences in price. It does not benefit Slovak insurers that patients of Slovak nationality insured with them should go to hospital on the Hungarian side of the border, which means more expensive treatment. It also contributes to the difficulties of establishing relations with institutions beyond the border that it has been incalculable in Hungary for years what will happen in health care. The fact that Hungarian hospitals still exist is a great achievement. Every institution struggles for 170
